Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

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Monday, 10 March 2014

OS six-inch maps for England and Wales 1842-1952

Major new map collection from the National Library of Scotland:

New map resource – OS six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952

We are very pleased to announce the availability of a new website resource - zoomable colour images of the Ordnance Survey's six-inch to the mile (1:10,560) mapping of England and Wales. All our map digitisation work in recent years has been externally funded, hence the recent expansion of our map images beyond Scotland.

This is the most detailed OS topographic mapping covering all of England and Wales from the 1840s to the 1950s. It was revised for the whole country twice between 1842-1893 and between 1891-1914, and then updated regularly for urban or rapidly changing areas from 1914 to the 1940s. Our holdings are made up of 37,390 sheets, including 35,124 quarter sheets, and 2,237 full sheets.

The maps are immensely valuable for local and family history, allowing most features in the landscape to be shown. The more detailed 25 inch to the mile (or 1:2,500) maps allow specific features to be seen more clearly in urban areas, as well as greater detail for buildings and railways. However, most topographic features on the 25 inch to the mile maps are in fact also shown on the six-inch to the mile maps.

This allows searching through a gazetteer of placenames, street names, postcodes and Grid References, as well as by zooming in on an area of interest with smaller-scale locational mapping as a backdrop.